knbber2:Who wants a car that can only go about 200 miles and then has to recharge for most of the day? And the baseline is only $60K, what a bargain.

To anyone who has this kind of negative gut reaction to Tesla Motors and the Model S, I offer a question: Have you found that your gut reactions have been wrong an awful lot lately? I mean, it turns out Apple made billions off the iPad, the auto bailout was a smart move, and George W really was a dick. You haven't exactly been batting 1.000 lately, have you?

And did you completely miss the whole last half of the article? Y'know, the part about the operational supercharger stations throughout California today, and the whole country in two years? The superchargers that give you 150 MILES IN 30 MINUTES VIA SOLAR FOR FREE?!?

Let me speak up for the cheap seats in here: Drive for five hours, eat a quick lunch, drive for two and a half hours more FOR FREE. For me (31 mile commute both ways at 38 MPG) this lands me 15k in savings over 8 years, which is how long the battery warranty lasts.

You can think with your lower intestines or you can think about the numbers with your higher brain. And here's a number for you: 2. That's how many cars Tesla Motors have developed to date. They've got good cash flow, happy enthusiastic customers, and a billionaire CEO who designs rockets in his spare time. These guys are just getting started.

knbber2:Who wants a car that can only go about 200 miles and then has to recharge for most of the day? And the baseline is only $60K, what a bargain.

Who drives more than 200 miles in a day on average?

And the few times a year someone does need to drive further, then just Priceline a rental car for a few days (~$12 a day usually). Or you know, use the second vehicle that the people who can drop $60K on a car usually have. If I was in the market for a car in that price range, I'd buy one.

I don't know where you live, but the meanings of "sometimes" and "holidays" are not the same as Daily...

The point, which you clearly missed, is that the bulk of most people's driving, daily, from day to day, not the occasional road trip or vacation, is less than 200 miles a day...

There, it's spelled out for you...

If you have a need for something OTHER than daily driving, then plan for it... rent a car... the money you will save in gas alone will pay for more than one of those occasional trips you sometimes took over the holidays...

Icetech3:Lets not talk about how bad electric cars are for the environment... A: Create a shiatton of batterys.. take a look at the chemicals used... B: Batteries have a VERY short lifespan, especially compared to a gas motor.. C: Hey! Lets dispose of those shiatty toxic batteries by the thousands now... The whole electric car idea is bullshiat being pushed on people. Just horrible...

This is, of course, entirely bullshiat. The typical lifespan for these batteries is about 10 years and they are typically recycled because the rare earth materials in them are valuable. Those that aren't are often repurposed as purely energy storage to, as an example, create arrays of battery backups for equipment.

And your recycling rant is also mostly bullshiat as well in that it relies upon strictly focusing on the problems with recycling - which are almost entirely caused by the behaviors of the recyclers and consumers - and then blaming those failings on the process itself.

1. It is ALWAYS better to reduce consumption than increase recycling. This is obvious and nobody disputes it2. SOME materials SOME of the time have a higher environmental cost through recycling either through energy expenditure or pollutants released than simply creating new virgin materials, however, this usually happens where the recycling is being done for economic rather than environmental reasons3. The fact that consumers can't figure out that they shouldn't throw farking pizza boxes in the paper bin doesn't mean recycling is bad, it just means consumers are stupid and lazy and won't do it right

Lets talk frankly about internal cleanliness:Icetech3: Lets not talk about how bad electric cars are for the environment... A: Create a shiatton of batterys.. take a look at the chemicals used... B: Batteries have a VERY short lifespan, especially compared to a gas motor.. C: Hey! Lets dispose of those shiatty toxic batteries by the thousands now... The whole electric car idea is bullshiat being pushed on people. Just horrible...

P.S. you should learn the truth behind recycling.. just recycling paper is VERY bad for the environment... the chemicals used.. AND the power used to recycle even paper is unreal..

The battery thing is why I just shake my head when the hippies get all jazzed up about hybrids and EVs. The metals that go into those batteries don't grow on trees... they're typically strip-mined. Then shipped somewhere to be smelted, shipped somewhere else to be processed into batteries, which are then shipped to the automaker's plant to be installed in the car, which is then shipped to a distributor, that then ships it to a dealer, that sells it to you. A Prius is about as green as a tire fire... any illusions had about reducing one's carbon footprint by owning one are just that... illusions. By the time you buy one and drive it home, the batteries alone have traveled more miles than you'll likely drive the first year of ownership.

Besides, if you drive like you actually have someplace to be, your mileage isn't any better than your typical gasoline-powered mid-size car. Yes, I'm talking to you, Mr. pass-me-doing-90-in-your-Prius.

So you know that lithium for the lithium-ion batteries (like the kind in the Tesla Model S) comes from brine that is pumped from under the Atacama desert and allowed to naturally dry in the sun, and is not only one of the cleanest minerals in the WORLD to mine, it is also a natural by-product of the mining they were ALREADY doing to produce fertilizer from teh same brine-drying process.

Not anger, i just don't see why you would be pushing back on this as much as you are... though with that engineering degree something tells me it might have something to do with your employment...

Personally, i don't think the country is ready for EV yet... because they aren't ready to give up or change their habits...

That's the real problem with innovation and change... people... people just can't seem to wrap their brain around doing something different than they've been used to doing...

I see that attitude at my job all the time... people recieve a new policy and pitch a fit because "that's not how we did it before!"

Who cares? it's how you do it until it changes again, and again, and again...

It's not the "love" of oil that people have, it's the love of routine... the love of familiarity... some people (washington and new jersey for example) still don't even know how to fill up their own gas tank, asking them to plug a cord into a vehicle is like asking them to flay open an infant with a straight razor...

Then, to top it off, they work harder and do more research trying to NOT change their habits than spending it just learning the new system...

jshine:Hollie Maea: Also, goddamn there is some ignorance in this thread. Why are people so terrified of progress?

It's nice that these are cheap to refuel, but it seems like a step backward to go from a vehicle that can be refueled in 5 minutes to one that takes hours to "fuel". Electric cars are great in principle, but battery technology sucks, quite frankly, and its at the core of the design. Fuel cells or some kind of internal generator (similar to the Chevy Volt) would seem like a better idea.

Jesus H Christ... You drive a mustang gt don't you? You have "American Muscle Cars 4life" tat'd on your penis? Because you are just a complete waste of farking conversation...

You realize that within a couple of years, they will come up with a magnetic charger pad like they have for your cell phones and toothbrushes, and all you will have to do is throw one down on the floor of your garage?

Park your car, and it charges... you won't even have to bother plugging it in, you just park your car and the next morning it's got a "full tank"...

But i bet your REAL issue, is that the car doesn't go RRRRRAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRR when you rev the engine at a stop light next to the 18 year old with the fart can on his civic...

I'll put it to you this way... in my 7 years of driving a Civic hybrid, I saved approximately 1200 gallons of gas. Do I think that the environmental cost of mining, smelting, alloying and manufacturing that battery pack is less than the environmental cost of drilling, storing, transporting, refining and distributing that gasoline? Yes, yes I do. Additionally, those batteries were charged solely by the waste energy involved in stopping the car. This means that at 37 KWhr/gal, the battery pack reused 44.4 GWh of energy that would have been lost as waste heat. Does that offset the energy cost of their manufacture? Yes, I think it does.

Saw one of these at the Oregon electric vehicle association the other day. Probably the best car ever made. No, it is not cheap, and no you wouldn't expect the best car ever made to be cheap, especially when it is using emerging technology.

Also, goddamn there is some ignorance in this thread. Why are people so terrified of progress?

I need to drive 500 miles a day and pull 5 tons of concrete on a trailer so these cars are stupid. This is even dumber than the subway. Can you get 5 tons of concrete on a subway? No. Because it is stupid. Who would ever use that?

knbber2:Who wants a car that can only go about 200 miles and then has to recharge for most of the day?

A lot of people, actually. Now, obviously this is still a niche product. I don't know about you, but I live in an apartment complex so there's no convenient way for me to charge an electric car in the parking lot. So right away the bulk of your market is going to be people with a home/garage. But considering the price tag, most people in the market for a car like this probably already own their own home.

But if I had the means I'd definitely snap one of these up. Slap some solar panels on the roof of the garage and a small battery array... For most people, it would save them a couple/few hundred dollars a month. Not really enough to recoop your costs on everything, but still pretty nice. Maybe even enough to take a good sized bite out of the monthly car payment...

And as others have said, the electric car in general is still more or less in its infancy. I'll be interested to see where this leads the auto industry in 10 years.

MrSteve007:This text is now purple: Those stations supplement from solar, but are primarily driven by grid energy.

They are indeed connected to the grid, but I wouldn't call generating an excess of power a "supplement."

BusinessWeek: "Musk also serves as the chairman of SolarCity, a residential and commercial solar-panel installer that has built car port technology for the Tesla stations. The stations will generate more power than the cars need, which means Tesla will sell power back to the grid" Link

This is their post 2-year plan for 30 minute charging stations, which supplement the thousands of standard, public charging stations already in place. (I currently have 13 public charging spots on the 25 mile drive between work and home).

The power to recharge a Tesla is much more than what the solar PVs can provide in that same time frame, so there must be a grid connection to provide the power during recharging.

But, the solar PVs are constantly feeding power back into the grid, even when no charging is taking place. There may be periods where days or weeks pass when no charging occurs, so that the PVs - over time - provide an overall surplus of power relative the amount used for recharging.

As the chargers are used more and more frequently, the "surplus" created by the solar PVs will disappear entirely.

Mining vehicles and equipment use fuel/electricityTransport vehicles use fuel/electricityManufacturing facilities and machines use fuel/electricityMore transport vehicles use more fuel/electricityAutomotive plants use fuel/electrcityAutomobile carriers (trains/ships = more transportation) use fuel/electricityAutomotive distributors/processors use fuel/electricityOnce again, Automobile carriers (Trucks at this step) use fuel/electricityI'm not much worried with the Dealership itself, but more electricity used there for prepping the vehicle for sale

Look how Green my car is!

The Strip mining itself is a very minor factor in the equation. What I'm saying is that it would help to be honest about the actual cost (or carbon footprint) of manufacturing these vehicles, but if the manufacturers did that, they probably wouldn't sell.

How much electricity do you think it takes to:

- find crude oil- drill for crude oil- pull crude out of the ground- transport crude to a refinery- refine a gallon of gas (according to the DOE, this step alone consumes 7.5 kWh per gallon, enough to propel an electric car ~30 miles)- transport that gas to a refueling station- power the refueling station, waiting for a customer- pumping that gasoline into your tank

Before an ounce of gasoline reaches your tank, a massive amount of energy has been put into creating and transporting that gas. And that doesn't factor in the gasoline's ~10% mix of ethanol, the fuel/fertilizer/water required to grow the corn for that ethanol, etc.

Look, pardner, just because an environmentalist touched you in a bad place, doesn't mean you're right. I wasn't talking about recycling the batteries. I'm talking about the fact that nickel is a major industrial metal, used for many, many other things than just NiMH batteries for Priuses and Civics. If there were no Priuses anywhere on the planet, nickel would still be strip-mined in megaton quanitites. You can't pin the entire environmental impact of nickel strip mining on NiMH batteries, because to do that would be intellectually disingenuous.

Hollie Maea:Also, goddamn there is some ignorance in this thread. Why are people so terrified of progress?

It's nice that these are cheap to refuel, but it seems like a step backward to go from a vehicle that can be refueled in 5 minutes to one that takes hours to "fuel". Electric cars are great in principle, but battery technology sucks, quite frankly, and its at the core of the design. Fuel cells or some kind of internal generator (similar to the Chevy Volt) would seem like a better idea.

Lets talk frankly about internal cleanliness:The battery thing is why I just shake my head when the hippies get all jazzed up about hybrids and EVs. The metals that go into those batteries don't grow on trees... they're typically strip-mined. Then shipped somewhere to be smelted, shipped somewhere else to be processed into batteries, which are then shipped to the automaker's plant to be installed in the car, which is then shipped to a distributor, that then ships it to a dealer, that sells it to you. A Prius is about as green as a tire fire... any illusions had about reducing one's carbon footprint by owning one are just that... illusions. By the time you buy one and drive it home, the batteries alone have traveled more miles than you'll likely drive the first year of ownership.

ajgeek:At $60,000, couldn't they make it a LITTLE lighter than 2.5 tons?

The weight is actually a huge advantage for this car. It carries the battery 12.5 - 17.5 inches off the ground depending on which active air suspension setting you choose, so the center of gravity is super low and it handles like a dream. And it can get away with being heavy because of how *clears throat* SUPERIOR a powerful electric motor is when it comes to delivering energy compared to a combustion engine. The standard model 85kw model has been tested to do 0 - 60 in 5.6 with 360 horsepower at ZERO rpm. The performance model does it in 4.0 seconds (3.9 by MotorTrend's testing) and hits 440 horsepower.

knbber2:Who wants a car that can only go about 200 miles and then has to recharge for most of the day? And the baseline is only $60K, what a bargain.

I guess this is your first experience with high-tech product launches. When you first make the product, your manufacturing process is naturally inefficient and you only have hopes of limited sales, thus the high price. If you can get enough early adopters to buy (either because of the status symbols or because they just like new tech), you can streamline your manufacturing process, improve the tech and start taking advantage of economies of scale.

Hollie Maea:Saw one of these at the Oregon electric vehicle association the other day. Probably the best car ever made. No, it is not cheap, and no you wouldn't expect the best car ever made to be cheap, especially when it is using emerging technology.

Also, goddamn there is some ignorance in this thread. Why are people so terrified of progress?

Mr. Right:Fubegra: Mr. Right:...................What works for trains isn't likely to work well for cars; a car has a vastly better power-to-weight ration than a train. It would take a hefty engine to make a Model S perform well when the batteries were drained (at least during acceleration).

Thanks for the info.

One also has to consider the energy efficiency of the distribution system. While our electric grid is inefficient it is way more efficient than tanker trucks hauling gas to your local gas station. One main efficiency of trains and power plants is that the fuels can be shipped at a high efficiency to a central location.

farkingatwork:I hope people realize where mercantilism (aka our current economy, sadly) fits in with ingenuity: it prevents it.http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/11/10/154211/tesla-motors-sued-by-c a r-dealers

People don't want Tesla to exist, because it could *GASP* compete with the oil industry and the automotive industry.

ph0rk:Why does everyone feel they need a full-lane four seat vehicle for their solo daily commute?

I have a wife, kids, and a dog. So we actually have a need for a full size vehicle. I also have a 250cc maxi-scooter that I drive when weather permits. I would love to get an electric vehicle though. I'm tired of gas engines... well... more to the point I'm tired of gas stations.

I'm in. I'll tool down the road. My horn will blare "I PAY NO ROAD USE TAX SUCKERS!" I'll tell the SUV fatass in the cube next to me "Kindly, fatass, perchance thee to fill your tank tonight. There's an awful pothole on my commute and I desire it filled. My car, lamentably, pays naught a cent of tax for such trifles."

Then I would push the company to set up a charging station near the entrance. Like a Handicapped parking but without all those gimpy overtones. When I walk past it, I'll say something like "Look that person is making a difference. Reducing our reliance on terrist oil and pushing U S American technology forward. What a real American hero he must be. Not like those lazy get blowed up soldiers in AfgahnIraq."